The vibes are getting better

 

When I've been told by news media that US majorities believe Donald Trump will be better for "the economy" than Biden and now Kamala Harris, I'm gobsmacked. 

 

And when I'm now shown, by the Financial Times via economic historian Adam Tooze that we now, slightly, think Harris would be better at the economic job, I'm also gobsmacked.

 

By the sorts of measures used by economists, the American economy has been chugging along happily for at least 12 months with something close to jobs for everyone who wants one, rising wages, low inflation, even a happy stock market (though how much this last has to do with the economy I don't know.) 

But for all that time, many survey respondents have been insisting that Trump would be better for "the economy." I can only conclude that mostly what people mean by "the economy" is confidence that they'll able to eat and have shelter, all with some degree of comfort and expectation for a future. 

Maybe sign boards advertising gas prices and perhaps boarded up storefronts figure somewhere in that, as well as Joe Biden's weak communication capacity and his age.

But the change in the polling tells me that surveys on "the economy" don't solely measure an economic reality. Apparently, in some part, they do heavily measure vibes. If we feel hopeful about the future, the world around us looks better. This can't entirely hide material realities, but it actually does help change our perceptions. (I'm sure some physicists have thoughts about how this works.)

In light of what's happening with current economic opinions, I can finally make sense of this amazing chart from last spring: 

Majorities of people polled in the electoral battleground states have thought their personal economic well-being had been getting better for a couple of years. Yet something was also convincing them that the country at large was doing poorly. I always was gobsmacked by this finding too. (As far as I know, no one has published an updated version of this question.)

Kamala Harris's attractive candidacy is apparently measurably restoring confidence in our future.

Not soley for transport ...

 

This one appears strictly decorative -- and decorated.

She seems abandoned. Why do I default to the female pronoun?

Masculine with a pox? I wonder.

It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

Time to push this guy into our past

Trump is crumbling. What he speaks to, the id of our society, is going strong.* But Kamala Harris unmasked his increasing personal weakness. 

Some of my favorite summations of what happened to that whining man on Tuesday: 

Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times:  

What struck me most about Trump was how tired he looked — and acted. Seriously. Not being snarky here. I’ve been noticing this when watching his campaign stops.

Something of the raging fire that helped ignite the Jan. 6 insurrection is just gone. Yes, he’s got his well-worked lines and his delivery retains his huckster polish. But he seems deflated, almost like he’s bored with it. Like the only time he really cared was when it turned personal.

Tuesday night, he was hunched over, scowling, easily led into traps by Harris that devolved into rants when he felt slighted.

At one point, after she baited him that world leaders were laughing at him, he came back with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban (who has cracked down on freedom of the press, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration) as proof that wasn’t true.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

It wasn’t a dumpster fire performance. But it seemed sad, a refreshing change from scary.

Charlie Warzel, tech and media reporter, The Atlantic:

What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.

David French, New York Times columnist on Xitter:

It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, "J6." She's debating Catturd.

Josh Marshall called it before the debate even began:

... I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. ...

•  The DOJ has indicted a fly-by-night "media company" for funneling millions in Russian money to right wing media personalities to stir up that American id.

There was a debate

I could natter on about the debate, but I think I'll leave it to Jamar Tisby, author of a new book pitched to evangelical Christians about heroic Black Americans: 

I prefer Frederick Douglass’ approach.

In a letter responding to a question about race and politics in 1873, he wrote,

Tell your wants, hold the party up to its profession, but do your utmost to keep it in power in State and Nation."

Douglass encouraged voters to hold their party accountable to its promises and to progress—but to first keep that party in office.

Only the most extreme ideologues approve absolutely everything a party or candidate says and does. Your vote should not be considered tacit agreement on every action that a politician takes or every statement they make.

The country doesn't love a whiner and that's all the former president offered last night.

On getting out of the way

Today on Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner offers "A Personal Meditation on Growing Old In a Catastrophic Age." She wonders are we, still healthy Boomers, "old and in the way"? She reports for herself, feeling of "shame" about retirement and also "fear of disconnection."

Yet, in this vital campaign season, she's far from disconnected. She's once again in Reno, NV, training volunteers to canvass voters for Harris-Walz, alongside the labor union UniteHERE. Those cooks and room cleaners are banging on doors for decency and democracy once again. You can join that work by signing up through Seed the Vote.

She explains:

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Erudite Partner also explains in this article that, unlike her, I have drawn back, that I am accepting that I'm retired from the immediate fray, just doing a little volunteer recruitment from home. After all these years during which I've made periodic forays into the center of the work of progress, this time I get to watch and cheer those who can and should struggle in a more central arena. It's a shock, but it feels right and realistic.

 New folks -- get out there and win!

From the streets of San Francisco

Reporter Heather Knight, along with photographer Loren Elliot, offers a largely sympathetic account [gift article] of some of what the city of San Francisco is doing to care for asylum seeking families who turn up in our midst. 

They huddled in the cold on a graffiti-covered bench last November, the twin girls dozing in their parents’ laps while the older children buried their heads in their phones.

Most nights, the family of six waited like this outside a San Francisco school gymnasium until it could be converted into a homeless shelter. Once inside, they slept each night on a small patch of the floor, then rose early each morning to secure a spot in one of the three showers shared by 69 people. They had to leave by sunrise so the school gym could be returned to its intended purpose.

Margarita Solito, 36, sometimes wondered if the 3,200-mile journey to San Francisco from El Salvador had been worth it. The family left as international migrants, and now they were migrants of a different sort, moving around their new city all day with nowhere to call home.

A year after arriving in the city, Ms. Solito’s fight for housing would pay off, and her family would be able to put down roots. But their journey shed light on the larger crisis of family homelessness in San Francisco and revealed the daily uncertainty that hundreds of schoolchildren face there. ...

Knight reports that 2403 children in the San Francisco Unified School District, 5 percent of total enrollment, are unhoused!

No wonder teachers and school staff wanted to use what space they could find in their building to shelter the children they serve. Neighborhood meetings averted most fears about using the Buena Vista/Horace Mann campus for this purpose. I live nearby; the nightly shelter residents have not discernibly upset the area.

San Francisco is relatively friendly to this work thanks to the tireless agitation of community and migrant groups. 

Today Bay Area Faith in Action rallied outside of the public San Francisco General Hospital in support of another resident of this shelter, Carmen Marquez, who contracted meningitis, spent 6 days in a coma, and then had to have 9 fingers and her lower leg amputated due to the disease. 

The City Department of Homelessness wants to send her and her teenage daughter back to a shelter. They say that despite her medical condition, she does not have enough points in the computer system to qualify for more permanent housing.

If wealthy San Francisco remains at all friendly to our poor neighbors, it's because of tireless agitation from organized people in community groups.

Truthtelling

We know the only thing he gives a damn about is saving his own guilty hide. He's coming apart mentally. But if he thinks beating on women will help him, he's happy to go there. 

I'd call this a pretty good ad, shared here because most of us don't live in contested states where it is being broadcast.

Kamala Harris: a long road to a new way forward

As I look at the presidential race, I wonder if I'm seeing an emerging majority coalition that has been inching its way into being for all the decades of my active election experience. We've come a long way.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump observed:

The country clearly exists in a moment of flux, in which, as Obama observed at the Democratic convention last week, we are fully testing the idea that a democracy built on pluralism can succeed. 

But part of the surge in enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy is clearly rooted in her overtly representing the diversity of America. Conservative White Americans often see America’s non-White population as a unified entity colluding to strip the power of Whites. 

The shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket allowed for a shift in strategy, too, from treating Trump as an opposing force to treating him as a historic outlier. Waving off Trump as “weird” has a knock-on effect, uniting those opposed to Trump’s candidacy and politics as the true inheritors of the American tradition.

... It may be that Trump helped bring to fruition the political shift predicted with Obama’s 2008 victory. His win proved to be a potent organizing force for White conservatives.

The election of another Black president in the face of that force, an election powered by a coalition strengthened by opposition to Trump, might in fact turn the page that began being written 15 years ago. It is a page, though, that has appeared in American history books multiple times before.

This reminded me of observations I made in early 2008, while watching the Hilary Clinton/Barack Obama primary.

It looks to me as though the Obama candidacy is trying to birth a national coalition which, like the Democratic one in California, doesn't quite have a secure demographic base though such a base seems visible on the horizon. This coalition must, at present, attract enough support outside its obvious members to win an election. Naturally, its leading edge is young voters, folks who live closer to that diverse and difficult demographic future older folks can envision but do not so nearly inhabit.

As Historian Bruce J. Schulman [original link is dead, unfortunately] of Boston University notes, Obama is not the first to try this. In addition to RFK, it's only fair to mention Jesse Jackson in 1988 -- at the end of 2008, will Obama have exceeded Jackson's total of wins in 11 states? ...

A long-term national progressive coalition must somehow hold together most African Americans, most Latinos, probably the majority of various Asian-origin voters, and enough whites, probably predominantly female, to make a majority. ...

Republican overreach, robbing women of our control over our bodies, has hastened the movement of many white women into this coalition. And these white women definitely vote, as do Black women.

On the other hand, it's taken long enough to get here that more and more Latinos and Asian-origin voters are beginning to vote as other immigrants have learned to before them: making electoral choices divided more on their class position in the new country than by ethnic affinities. Think Italians or Irish moving beyond hyphenated status. That's too a kind of American progress but it adds to today's progressive challenges.

But in a general way, the potential Democratic Party coalition visible in 2008, and in California fifteen years before that, may finally be coming to fruition nationally in Kamala Harris' candidacy, if we can push this candidate over the finish line.

MAGA backlash replicates birtherism in response to Obama and California reactionary nativism of the 1990s and before. Anyone else remember when California was Ronald Reagan's launch pad based on bashing hippie students? 

Coalition pluralism was the challenge in 2008; it's still the challenge today. But it can happen. It's no accident that today a Californian leads a Democratic ticket capable of confirming the possibly of a new way forward.

Friday cat blogging

Mio enjoys an evening sunbeam. When you are a nearly 20 pound cat, you apparently aren't shy or cautious about exposing your furry belly.

Simple statement of fact

 

Snapshot of sign beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania, thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College, is probably the most important state in the presidential election. The winner there is likely to win.

 

Everything suggests the contest will be very close.

As anyone who has worked in elections knows, the presence of lots of signs doesn't win the vote. But they sure do encourage supporters. This one is bold.

Tumultuous political failure

Rory Stewart is brilliant, charming, singular, and thoroughly obnoxious. His memoir, How Not to Be a Politician, would not be to many reader's taste, but I found it fun and informative.

Stewart is a Brit/Scot from an upper class professional family. I first became aware of Stewart when he served in various military and administrative roles among Brits allied in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the '00s -- and became a smart and vocal critic of the U.S. occupation's absurdities and dysfunction. As well he might have -- before these wars, he had famously walked across Iraq, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Nepal. He knew something about these people and places, unlike the North American bumblers with the guns and his own British politicians.

On returning home, he decided he needed to do something about all this. In 2010, he declared himself a Tory (that's the Conservative Party) and through luck and accident managed to win the opportunity to contest and win the remote district of Penrith and the Border adjacent to Scotland. He was now a Member of Parliament. Through a series of kerfuffles, policy controversies, and administrative misadventures, he survived as a Tory Member through 2019 when he ran for party leadership in a failed effort to avert a Boris Johnson government and a chaotic implementation of Brexit.

The policy strands of this memoir are what political memoirs usually center on, concerns like rural development in his isolated home constituency, an effort to extricate Britain from America's Middle Eastern wars, whether to leave the European Union via Brexit, and once his Remain position lost the popular referendum, how to carry out the people's will with the least damage to the country.

That's all important, but what made this an interesting account for me was his picture of how the accreted quasi-system that is Britain's unwritten political constitution was functioning. Not well. Now -- Americans have nothing to crow about as we struggle to preserve popular democracy within a written Constitutional framework constrained by such immovable absurdities as the Electoral College and the rule that every state gets two Senators regardless of the size of its population. But Stewart argues convincingly that British government is even more irrational.

He recounts his orientation to his new job from his Party legislative leader:

We should not regard debates as opportunities for open discussion; we might be called legislators but we were not intended to overly scrutinize legislation ... 'I always try to get consensus as chief whip,' the chief whip concluded, 'and the consensus is that the prime minister is right.'

... Even the most rebellious MPs, famous for their obstreperousness, voted against the government in perhaps only five votes out of a hundred. All of which raised certain questions about the theory that MPs were independent legislators ...

Finding that his job as a backbencher was to be an automaton, Stewart worked on improving the lives of his constituents (notably by increasing broadband in the countryside) and finagled to get into one of the junior ministerial positions open to MPs. In this respect the system is very different from the United States.

Ambitious Members from the governing party are chosen by the prime minister to exercise executive authority in the various departments of government. But unlike cabinet members in the U.S. who genuinely attempt to direct the departments to which they are appointed by presidents, MPs continue as legislators; their sub-cabinet and cabinet appointments are add-ons. No particular expertise in the actual work -- such as preserving the environment, running prisons, or foreign aid -- is expected or required to become a minor minister. In fact, expertise was the reverse of what was sought; Conservative leaders sure didn't want Stewart having any authority over anything about Afghanistan or central Asia where he knew the ropes and the languages.

Stewart quickly learned that the permanent civil servants, accurately, figured that uninterested junior ministers came and went and could be ignored, politely. He recounts perhaps instituting some interesting reforms in the under-funded, under-appreciated prison system -- until he was abruptly moved on. Insofar as Stewart is fair and accurate, this seems a hell of an undemocratic way to run a government.

The stresses of governing after the destabilizing Brexit vote eventually did in Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May; ushered in the frivolous, self-aggrandizing leadership of Boris Johnson; and led through short prime ministerial tenures to this year's resounding replacement of the Tories with a Labour government. By then, Stewart was long gone. But his account of the early stages of the Tory self-immolation is cutting.

[In 2019] for eight and a half years, the government had been an elective dictatorship run by the prime minister, and Parliament an elderly, smelly Labrador, asleep by the fire. Once a year, perhaps, someone would step so hard on our tail that we would snap, and in doing so stop the redesigning of the House of Lords, or the Syria bombing; but generally we were entirely passive. We, the Conservative MPs voted loyally for the government day in and day out, late into the night.

But Brexit had transformed the conventions of British politics. The generally loyal, if grumpy, mass of Conservative MPs had been turned into warring Brexiteers and Remainers. ...

... authority was leaching away from all of us. The referendum, by giving a direct say to the general public, had made Parliament a low-lying island in a rough and rising sea. And many of the people, having 'spoken', began to perceive parliamentary debates and votes as just different forms of obfuscation, delay and betrayal.  ...

When the Party deposed Theresa May, Stewart felt he had to run for leadership because the more obvious candidates would not dare to state what to him was obvious:

... none of them was prepared to say that Boris Johnson was manifestly unsuitable to be prime minister. ... to put an egotistical character like Boris Johnson in the heart of a system that was already losing its dignity, restraint and seriousness was to invite catastrophe...

Stewart was proved right, of course. Often being right does not lead to popularity. 

His memoir has a supercilious tone that I am sure was endlessly grating to his colleagues. The guy is the opposite of a team player. He comes across as pretty sure he knows it all -- and sometimes he does. But the result is an delicious record of tumultuous political failure. I'm glad to have read it.

Why the turn to unions

It's no revelation that most of us have low confidence in most of the institutions of US society. So it is revelatory that one often scorned institution has been gaining in prestige over the last 15 years: labor unions.

Click to enlarge.

Michael Podhorzer, retired political director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, has some thoughts about how this came to be. 

Let’s be honest: If you’re reading this post, chances are good that you have at least some agency in your working life. You might be a knowledge worker who can telecommute, you might have pretty good pay and benefits, you might manage other people, and so on. Chances are also good that you strongly support unions. You might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life – unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will. When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!” 

This “fuck yeah” is exactly what scares plutocrats like Trump and Musk the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll. Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. Ordinary people need institutional collective power to make their demands heard, let alone met. 

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about. Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu. ...

Read the whole thing for much more explication and elaboration.

Making a true labor day of it

For San Francisco hospitality workers who are members of the union UniteHERE, it's not a vacation day, it's a day to picket their hotel workplaces. Per the Chronicle:

Housekeepers, hosts, bellmen, servers, cooks, dishwashers and market assistants are striking at the 1,921-room Hilton Union Square, the city’s biggest hotel, as well as the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Grand Hyatt at SFO, Palace Hotel and Westin St. Francis.

 

There was plenty of spirit. 

And lots of energy.

Workers don't respect hotel owners pleas of poverty ... and there sure seem to be plenty of tourists gawking in Union Square.

Lots of local politicians showed up, as the smart ones do. I particularly liked the obvious delight on the face of Supervisor Connie Chan, up for re-election in the Richmond District.

Labor Day: workers built this

 

In addition to enjoying this celebratory picture, it's worth noting where I ran across it. The U.S. Department of Labor site has a rather nice history of the holiday. Somehow I don't think that would survive the implementation of Project 2025 under a Trump presidency ...

American labor has raised the nation’s standard of living and contributed to the greatest production the world has ever known and the labor movement has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation's strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.

• • •

Michael Kazin, an historian of the Democratic Party, makes an observation about Labor Day that I think we should remember: 

There was a unique quality to Labor Day that set it apart from more universal, largely apolitical celebrations like Thanksgiving. Until the first observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Labor Day was the only national holiday that a social movement both created and persuaded the state and businesses to honor. [I would point as well to observance of Juneteenth.]

So take to the streets or spread out your picnic blanket and sing some of these great labor songs.

This democracy of ours is more and more the fruit of people's movements built on top of the foundation laid by aspirational Founders.